


Poor Atlas

by Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep



Series: The Vague Les Mis Sped AU [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Access Intimacy, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Special Education, Developmental Disability, Disabled Characters, Gen, Gender Issues, Trauma, assistive technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 05:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4508832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep/pseuds/Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hurt Cosette, to have this body and this brain. Hurt in a different way to find friends who knew how it felt.<br/>...Hi, Grantaire. </p><p> </p><p>The process of having a developmentally disabled body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poor Atlas

**Author's Note:**

> This work is set in my Sped 'verse. You can find more snippets from it [on my Tumblr,](http://soundingonlyatnightasyousleep.tumblr.com/tagged/the-unnamed-Vague-Les-Mis-SPED-AU/chrono) but all you need to know is that it is a modern AU where everyone is a disabled teenager. (Cosette has a developmental disability. Marius is autistic and has depression. Grantaire has undiagnosed ADHD, depression, and anxiety.) 
> 
> Bad things along the lines of canon happened to Cosette as a young child. This particular fic contains discussion of DD bodies, including some involuntary sexualization. Characters also have weird gender feelings.
> 
> Title is from Dessa's song Poor Atlas.

**Face**  
It was an accident that Cosette looked in the mirror and saw that she was pretty.

Usually, her face was a collection of parts. Brown skin, round cheek, downy hair, wet eye. At best, they existed hanging in the mirror. To have a flesh body that belonged to her, at all times, was unbearable. It hurt to be embodied when she thought about it, so she didn't. It hurt to think about why it hurt, so she couldn't stop thinking about it. 

She lifted her face to the mirror again. Same combination of parts, and she could not stop thinking of them as a face. It was tired, but then she did not know anyone who wasn't tired. The fact of it was that she was pretty, her face was pretty, and it hurt so much to have a face. Other people had faces, and there would be other people where she was going.

Her wide eyes and blank muscle and gaping mouth together made an instrument of war after all, and she looked hard and thought, okay. I can do this.

 **Hands**  
Life Skills class got to have chickens in the spring. Well, needed to. Enjolras was already scowly over it. "Chickens are not a Life Skill!" he insisted, and he was right, but. Cosette liked the chickens. They rolled in dust to have a bath. She was kind of jealous. 

She thought Marius liked the chickens too, the way he patted each one on the head, and Joly liked them from where he did Science on them from the chair the teacher brought out for him, and even Grantaire the teacher's assistant greeted the chickens with a "Bro. Bros."

The point is, she liked taking care of the chickens, so it was just unfair when she saw her hands gripping the handle of a bucket of water, and everything slid sideways. 

She remembered a bucket falling from her cold hands. She remembered going to get water one day at night. She remembered fear and two figures standing over her. Bite of snow at her ankles. Glowing window. Shape of dark abyss. Afraid. The feeling of afraid.

She didn't know how long she was frozen there before Grantaire waved from where he stood in front of her. 

"Ah. Hey." The way his hands flexed in empty air was very gentle, she thought. 

Cosette looked down. "Oh no." A puddle of water was poised as a dark dome above the dry dirt. "Oh no," she moaned. She had done something bad again. 

"Hey. It's okay. Um. There's more water over there?" Grantaire's voice was getting louder as he spoke. "I'll go get it, I'll go get all the water." He rushed away.

"Thanks," Cosette said, several beats after he could no longer hear her.

 **Shoulders**  
Atlas was a Greek Titan who held up the whole Earth, Cosette knew from her Stories class. An atlas was a book of maps, Cosette also knew. 

It was disappointing somehow when she opened up an atlas one day and saw that it contained not maps of his body, but maps of the world on his shoulders. 

**Skin**  
The thing about being pretty was that different rules applied to her now. Pretty could help people look away from the rest of her, but she had to follow the rules.

She shouldn't move too much, she shouldn't talk too much (but she should talk some, or else they would think she couldn't talk at all), and she had to cover herself in the right clothes. 

"A pretty girl, but badly dressed," she had heard someone say on the street as she walked by with Papa, and she knew now that they were talking about her. Tights and fuzzy skirts and sweaters soft against her skin were wrong, definitely, somehow. 

She didn't know what to wear if all her clothes were wrong, so she mostly hid in her bathroom because it was summer and she could.

Papa didn't let her use the computer without him looking over her shoulder, and she felt for some reason that his help would be wrong on this, so she couldn't look it up on the Internet. And she wasn't quite sure what most of the girls at school would look like. 

So it would have to be her brain, then, and any fashionable women she could remember seeing in movies. After a minute, she drew up a graph to log all the details she could. 

Several hours later, she slipped out of the bathroom, dressed in pajamas, and handed Papa a list. "I want new clothes, Papa." 

"Of course, my child," he said. "I will order them right away." 

"And dinner, Papa?" He would definitely eat if she ate with him, Cosette had learned. 

"Of course, my child."

It was a whole two weeks later before the clothes arrived. She told Toussaint, the care person for when Papa went on business trips, "I'll just be in my room the rest of the afternoon," and got a trembling smile from where Toussaint fanned herself on the living room couch. Once in her room, the packaging went under the bed along with all the other paper that Cosette had ever gotten, and she inspected her new outfits.

They were black because she remembered from a therapist's office magazine that black was always fashionable, and they were tight because the point of this was to be able to tell where her body was, and they were stiff just because that was the exact opposite of her old clothes. She jumped into jeans, blazer, high boots, and did not look at her face in the mirror. 

The wire screen corner scratched her as she climbed through the window. 

Outside was sunshiny. Bright. Some sunglasses would be nice next time, Cosette decided. They were Glamorous. Her ankle wobbled in the heeled boot.

She looked around their back garden. Really, she didn't know what to do now any more than whenever she went out, so she walked to the park. Some of the flowers there were brown today. Her nose was hot when she touched it. The back of her hand was smeared clear though, not red, so it was okay. 

For once she just wanted to go out and for no one to notice her. When she went out with Papa, people smiled kindly at them and offered help they didn't know how to give. The only time she had went out alone, confused and in her soft clothes a group of boys had followed her around and smiled. Not kindly. 

Now she sat on the bench, and there were hardly any people, so really no one noticed her. Well, there was a boy curled half underneath a bench who had stared at her for a long time, but then he turned away and stared at his heavy-looking book for an even longer time, so that didn't count. No one really noticed her, and it was hot out, and she sat there in her stiff clothes by herself in the park. 

When she got home, climbing back in her window was harder. Her palms were slick with sweat. She was probably kind of dizzy. She had only just snuck down to the kitchen and tried to get some water when Toussaint showed up.

"Cosette, you don't look well." Worried tone. Cosette tried to smile, but the room was kind of green. Toussaint frowned and plucked the cup out of her hands. "I'll get the water, oh dear. Please go lie down. Your skin is very hot and I think you might have heatstroke. Oh, it's what comes of this weather when you're wearing those clothes!" 

Cosette laid down. She was very dizzy now. The heat was rising, and she needed new rules. 

**Hair**  
The very first people at her school she had ever seen were Joly and Bossuet and Grantaire. 

Well, the first people she ever saw there were Papa and herself because the Special Ed room had a mirror right across from the door when they walked in, but she did not think that really counted. 

"Hey!" someone had borderline-yelled at her while she blinked in shock at her reflection. She tried to take Papa's hand before remembering that she was trying not to do that anymore. When she turned to look the speaker turned out to be a floppy boy holding a cane covered in...rainbowy stickers? It was very pretty, Cosette decided, but in a wrong way that made her insides tighten. Schools had lots of people. He shouldn't have been using that thing where they would notice him for it.

"You are surely here to join our merry band!" the boy continued. "I'm Joly, by the way. We here all call ourselves by last name, because we are ridiculous!" He grinned. Now that he talked more, Cosette could hear a slight wet slur in his words. He was probably okay. He definitely did not comb his hair. 

"She is named Cosette," Papa murmured to him. "Surname Fauchulevant, though she doesn't like to be called anything but Cosette." Cosette had combed her hair a little this morning, since it was on the list stuck to her bathroom mirror, but she didn't put any stuff in to make it less puffy. 

"Lesgles, but Bossuet is cool too. Don't ask," offered the boy with an arm around Joly. He also definitely did not comb his hair. Because he had it all shaved off. Cosette wondered if his parents had done it. 

"I'm Grantaire," said a third boy, who was standing in the corner and kind of smiling at Joly and Bossuet. "I'm not in this class, I'm just the teacher's assistant," he added, like it was automatic. "Everyone else is at, um...lunch?" He smiled at her, and this smile looked like he practiced it. Maybe that's what the mirror was for. 

"Lunch," confirmed Joly. 

Papa nodded gravely, and so did Cosette. Shouldn't they be eating too? Was Grantaire really enough to watch them while everyone was gone? She didn't ask. 

"Well," Papa said. "You seem like a nice group of young people." Then, like he was wincing a little, "Ah. Would you like to go talk to them, my child? I will just wait here." 

Cosette stared at them from the doorway. No one tried to hug her, which was good. She liked hugs more than people usually expected. She just gave a little wave, and they all waved back with different amounts of skill. 

So she went over to them. "I'm Cosette," she said, even though they already knew. She bit her lip.

"Um, are you a freshman, or are you a transfer?" Grantaire asked. Joly and Bossuet had gone back to some kind of game that involved poking each other in the face, so they didn't pay attention to Cosette. 

"Transfer," Cosette replied. "I was homeschooled?" Grantaire tapped his fingers a lot, and tugged at his hair, which was curly and probably also not brushed. She sorted him in between Joly and Bossuet for hair combing. 

"So yeah, this is a school, and this is this class." He gestured around them. "The administration just kind of puts them all together. There's this guy, actually!" Grantaire's hands stopped tapping and waved around in the air. "His name's Enjolras, he's like the leader, and he's hella intense. Like a tree, and everyone else is just bushes. Like, he reaches the sun more than other people, and it shows in the light of his strength. And we all try to be ephicytes but we more resemble parasites."

"Like a tree," Cosette repeated. 

Grantaire winced. "Yeah, okay, that's kind of stupid, but I promise that the stupidity of my description in no way detracts from Enjolras's him-ness. Sorry, sorry. I kind of...too much." 

Cosette didn't think it was stupid. It was kind of fun, actually, listening to this boy's reasons for sorting people into plants. "Sorry. It's okay," she told him. 

"Um," Grantaire flailed, "You have really pretty hair! I could do braids in it. Most everyone else has hair too short to braid. Enjolras has braids, but they're kinda permanently in his hair, so." Grantaire really liked braids and Enjolras, Cosette guessed. 

"Cosette," Joly interupted. He seemed to have won the poking game. "You don't have to go along with his hair-brained schemes, you know." Cosette giggled, but something in his voice was serious.

"Yeah," said Bossuet, "How do you think I lost my hair?" He made a face like the SCARED face on the poster behind him. 

"While technically true--" Grantaire started. 

"No. It's okay. I want you to make my hair pretty," Cosette broke in. It really was okay. They seemed nice and didn't try to give her too much help, and none of them combed their hair. 

"Well then," Grantaire said, "I promise to make your hair at least as pretty as Joly's cane." 

**Breasts**  
A little bit after Cosette started school, she began putting things in her bra. This was a thing that girls in books did, and it worked okay. Her phone, or coins, or whatever she put in there were a bit warm when she took them out, and it was pleasant.

This was a mistake. Mrs. M. saw her reaching inside her bra to pull out an eraser during Writing, and she immediately grabbed her hands.

"Cosette, honey, don't pull your shirt down like that!" She sounded angry. 

"Why?" Cosette asked. It was nice going to school, where so many people other than Papa did things, and she could ask questions about them. It was not nice having her wrists in Mrs. M.'s hands, but Cosette couldn't move away yet.

"We don't touch our private parts. It calls attention. People might get the wrong idea!" What that idea was when she had definitely seen some girls in the hallway put things in their bras, Cosette didn't know, but Mrs. M. was mad. If the idea involved them grabbing her, then well. Well.

"Okay," Cosette quietly said, and tried not to think about her breasts.

 **Stomach**  
Cosette's stomach did not really talk to her brain anymore, really. It used to. She used to feel hungry a lot, when Papa first adopted her, but then it stopped. It was okay. She could just eat at mealtimes, and a snack in the afternoon. The checkup doctor said she was eating fine. 

Besides, Papa's body didn't talk to his brain right either. At least, he didn't eat all the time. Sometimes he would just sit and read, or pray. When he made food, he made only enough for Cosette, unless she asked if he would eat too. He would then. 

Nobody in the house was good at being hungry, so Cosette bought lots of snacks they could eat even if they weren't hungry in time to make food. Papa would get whatever she asked for, and she was very good at making grocery lists. Cosette had decided that they were both going to have matching water bottles and boxes of snacks under their beds, so they did.

When she started leaving the house more, she got a big purse, which was something many Sophisticated Girls had, to put food in. It was good to have. It helped her feel safe. 

And then one day, it helped someone else. 

It was during lunchtime, and the Special Ed class really didn't eat with everyone else. Cosette could understand why they didn't want to. She only liked to eat in front of other people if she had enough food to share, but now she always had enough to share, which was nice. But some of the others didn't like eating with the whole school. So Combeferre, who was the one usually thinking about science, and Grantaire, had played being the Responsible Disabled Student and the Normal Volunteering Student and somehow convinced the adults to let the class stay and eat in the special ed room. 

Grantaire usually sat by her, and sometimes Joly and Bossuet did too, but Cosette gave some of the food Papa made to everyone. Bahorel, who looked older and didn't come to school every day, thought that she was "hella awesome" for sharing the food, or so Joly told her. She was trying to learn some ASL, but it was hard to remember that the space from her body meant things. 

Today, she gave out bites of her rice bowl, and then Marius fainted very quietly into his book.

Marius didn't talk to her much, but then he didn't talk to anyone much. He was very pretty, and mostly stared at books in foreign languages that he carried around. 

"Shit," Grantaire hissed. Marius fainting was not good. She had to fix it. She got dizzy when it was too hot, but the room was cool, and Grantaire sometimes got dizzy and when he was nervous, but Marius wasn't breathing fast like Grantaire would. 

"Um," Cosette said, "I have some juice?" Marius hadn't been eating. When Papa hadn't eaten for a while, he drank juice and felt better. 

"Shit. Yeah," said Grantaire. He took the bottle she grabbed from her purse and waved his hands in front of Marius's face. "Hey. Uh, can you get up? Have some juice." 

Marius got up and had some juice. He looked better after he drained the whole bottle and coughed. "Sorry," he muttered, glaring down at the table.

"It's okay," Grantaire said at the same time as Cosette shouted, "No! I have enough. You don't need to say 'sorry.'" 

"Yeah, what Cosette said," Grantaire got out quickly. Then he backed away and looked at her like he wanted her to say something. 

"Well," she said, "You only fainted for a couple seconds. No one noticed. Ah...you should eat at mealtimes, even if...you can't tell that you're hungry." She stopped. 

"Oh," Marius said, like she hadn't just said something obvious she told herself all the time, "That is a good idea." He smiled at her like he was trying hard, and he really was so pretty. Marius wasn't the right type of pretty that normal girls were, but suddenly Cosette wanted to be as pretty as his red mouth was. 

Marius looked up at her, and the picture of him glancing through his eyelashes over a heavy book shook something loose.

"Ah!" she realized, "You're that boy from under the bench! You watched me at the park!" 

"Ye-es?" said Marius. "Your clothes are different now. You still look nice though." 

"Yes," Cosette said. The boy who had noticed her thought she looked nice, not pretty. Yes.

Her stomach didn't talk to her brain anymore, not after the bad things that had happened to her and a bucket of water, but she could talk to a boy like her anyway.

 **Brain**  
There were a lot of holes in her brain, she knew, she knew. There were holes in how her hands moved, and there were holes in what happened to her a long time ago, and there were holes in the part of her that remembered where the holes were. 

There wasn't a hole in the part of her brain that remembered why she didn't like doctors though. She knew. Doctors were strangers, who made her do silly things, and who were wrong. Cosette didn't go to the doctor that often. Once, one doctor had her brush her teeth and tie her shoes and all sorts of things, and then told Papa that she should be living on a home or farm. Away from him. 

Papa didn't take her to a lot of doctors after that. 

But a doctor had to see her if she wanted to go to school, and she did want to go to school. She wanted it so much, without understanding why, but if she had to understand everything she did, she wouldn't do anything. It was okay, she supposed, to want something without a good reason, so she wanted to go to school.

The school office had a doctor in it, a man, that she was supposed to see. When he pointed her inside the door, he said, "Without your dad, please," and then to Papa, "We see all high school students by themselves or with their support staff, no parents." The doctor looked like the kind of person who told people what to do all the time, even though he was wearing a blue sweater and not a white doctor's coat. Papa frowned even harder, but Cosette did her best pretty smile and followed the doctor. 

The doctor was kind of old. Cosette couldn't guess how old, but he was maybe younger than Papa. He gave her lots of forms, and told her to circle the numbers "that are most accurate." The pen he handed her was pink and kind of heavy, but it was easy to draw circles on the paper with. 

"Hmm," the doctor said, looking at her filled-out forms. "Ah. Yes. I will have to look at these more closely, but Cosette," he smiled, "You have trouble remembering things, right?" 

Cosette took a breath, and said, "Yes." She was blinking fast, she suddenly noticed.

"And you said here that...something bad happened to you?" 

"Yes," and this time she tried to make herself as still as she could. 

"Well, it seems that you have some support needs that necessitate you be in some of our special education classes. There are more evaluations, both psychological and functional, that you'll need to undergo, but I think it's safe to start you off with this," and he handed her something.

Cosette didn't understand all of what he said, or even most of it, but she took it anyway. Shiny-smooth.

"It's a tablet computer. The school has a set to help students like you," the doctor was saying, "You can take pictures with it, and put apps on that help you do things, and go on the Internet. It's extra support for your brain."

"I make lists," she said, because she still didn't understand, but she made lists, and that was the kind of thing that always stayed true.

"You can do that, too!" and the doctor looked excited. "Well. We'll have to arrange some visits of the school, and do paperwork with your papa, but this is looking good. Wait with that tablet. Here," and he grabbed it from her hands and put something around it. "It's a case, to protect it."

Cosette got the tablet back, now with case. It was bumpy rubber, and very purple. It was not something that she thought pretty girls carried around at all, but. It felt nice to hold, and she wanted it. 

"Do you have any questions?" the doctor asked her.

She held her new extra brain in front of her, and asked.

**Hands, again**

Nail polish was good to stare at. She startled, sometimes, when she caught a glimpse of color and she could see her hands existed. 

Nail polish was good to stare at when people yelled. When she was small, she never would have had nail polish, so she could look at it when people yelled and remember that she was not small anymore.

"I'm not one of you. It's fun, it's a glamour, but everyone knows I'm not like you." Grantaire's voice, at this point, was getting more thin. Cosette didn't know how long she had been frozen here staring at pretty soft purple and listening to a fight, but probably Grantaire was getting tired too.

"Don't be so..." Enjolras still snarled rough. "You know. You can't possibly think that it's a coincidence you get assigned to this class every year, even as the assistant. You know, Grantaire. Everyone knows."

The noise stopped, and then Grantaire came shouldering out the classroom. Cosette made a small sound at him.

He smiled at her. He was crying. It didn't look any different from his normal smile. 

Cosette grabbed his hands. Grantaire liked having people touch him, so she grabbed his hands and led him to the bathroom.

She had a key to the one-person one. Some of them did so they wouldn't have to use the normal bathrooms. Grantaire was breathing big, shuddery breaths now, and Cosette made big, even breaths for him, and brought him in. 

"You like pretty things?" she said. She was pretty sure he did, he liked Enjolras and he liked making braids in her hair.

"Yes," Grantaire kind of hissed. Cosette was pretty sure he was trying to put something into the tone of his voice, but it wasn't working. She sifted through her bag.

"These are pretty. For you."

Grantaire spread his hands on the counter when she moved them into place. He seemed to be holding his breath and biting at his lip at the same time, which looked pretty hard. Cosette worked as fast as she could, even though her hands didn't always do what she wanted them to. There was no way he couldn't tell what she was doing, but he stood there and let her, kind of glassy.

When she was done, Grantaire held up his hands, stopped a bit, and then actually laughed. 

"Yes!" Cosette shouted. It was good.

The bursting little galaxies on the nail polish she had pressed onto his fingers looked so pretty. Grantaire was gently tapping his fingers on his cheek over and over. 

"Cosette," he asked, suddenly not angry anymore, "You can tell too, can't you?"

She thought a little while. "That you're not a boy, not like how other boys mean it."

Grantaire jerked like he had been shocked. 

"That too, I guess," he shuddered out. He curled up even more.

"It's okay," Cosette said. "It's like...the nail polish wasn't really made for people like us, and that's how it's going to be for the rest of our lives, but it's okay and we can do this." As she said it, she put her hands over Grantaire's, still on his cheek.

"I pretty much never want to think about the rest of my life." Grantaire looked tired and smiled, and it was the most tiredness and the best smile she had ever seen him give off. "But you want to take a picture to remember anyway?"

They each held up a hand, and Cosette only looked at their hands in the mirror while she lined up the shot. As she tapped the button, they pressed the worlds they held at their fingertips together.


End file.
